Film
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The Schmooze To Somalia and Back Again
Michael Maren has lived an Indiana Jones kind of life: Peace Corps volunteer, war correspondent from Africa, kidnap victim of a Somali warlord, author, and now filmmaker. However, anyone expecting a hard-hitting documentary exposing the troubles of foreign aid (the subject of his book, “The Road to Hell”) is in for a surprise. In fact,…
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Film & TV Celebrating the Beauty of Israel in Film
On Yom Haatzmaut morning, bright and early at 8:30 am, my four-year-old son Asher broke a crystal vase. It was an accident, but it could have been avoided. He could have chosen to play in a different place, and we as parents could have guided him better in his morning shenanigans. Horrified, Asher asked if…
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The Schmooze Portraits of Holocaust Heroism
The title characters of filmmaker Michael King’s inspirational documentary, “The Rescuers,” are a dozen people, mostly diplomats, who saved thousands of Jewish lives during the Holocaust. In many cases, they defied their own government’s specific instructions in order to arrange exit visas for families otherwise headed for extermination. Some of these stories are already reasonably…
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The Schmooze How Shabbat Dinner Can Save America
In the film “Fed Up,” opening May 9, the untenable reality pours down like a mid-summer rain: In the United States, more people die from obesity than starvation. 87% of food items on supermarket shelves have added sugars. Teenagers are having gastric bypass surgery. We’ve become a corpulent nation, which is not news to anyone…
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The Schmooze ‘Ida’: Conversation with Director Pawel Pawlikowski
“Ida,” a fascinating and disquieting Polish language film written and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, is a post-Soviet Polish rumination, a mystery with religious and political overtones. Pronounced as “Eeda,” Pawlikowski told me during our chat: “I needed a good name and remembered the Jewish Polish actress Ida Kaminska. It was a name I liked, but…
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The Schmooze Polish Drama in Black and White
Shot in rich black and white, “Ida” is a quiet, deliberately paced study of the end of innocence for a young Polish woman, Anna, raised an orphan in a convent. It is the early 1960s. On the verge of taking her vows, the Mother Superior tells Anna that her only living relative, an aunt, wants…
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Culture ‘Ida’ Revisits Poland in the Shadow of the Holocaust
Pawel Pawlikowski left Poland at the age of 14, but his childhood memories of his homeland never left him. It’s no surprise then that “Ida,” a stunning portrait of two very different women whose lives intersect in 1960s Poland, is the director’s most assured and confident narrative feature yet. The film takes place in the…
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The Schmooze Josef Mengele in Patagonia
It seems apt that a renowned figure of evil — the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, the so-called “Angel of Death,” notorious for his cold-blooded “selections” at Auschwitz — should inspire a film whose mood is at once mysterious and sinister, yet whose visual style is strangely poetic, perhaps even terrifyingly beautiful. In the space of…
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Culture He works at a Holocaust museum by day. How’d he end up in ‘Marty Supreme’?
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News The ADL’s turn away from civil rights was years in the making — Oct. 7 accelerated it
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News The Holocaust Torah that survived a Mississippi synagogue fire was brought there by the state’s only survivor
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Culture The mysterious case of Barbra Streisand and the missing half-pound of Zabar’s sturgeon
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